 My name is Rocio Ortega and I'm ProPublica's Events Associate. Welcome to today's session, Juvenile Justice in Tennessee. Thank you to McKinsey and Company for their support of today's event. For those new to us, ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom dedicated to investigative journalism with moral force. This month, ProPublica and National Public Radio co-hosted and co-published an investigation into the juvenile justice system. The article revealed that Rutherford County locked up 48% of children in cases referred to juvenile court in 2014. The statewide average is 5%. And now has contracts to jail children from 39 other counties. The reporting sparked national outrage and left many readers with questions about how to move forward. ProPublica reporter Ken Armstrong, WPLN news reporter Mariba Knight and WPLN news director Emily Siner join us tonight to answer your questions. Ken Armstrong joined ProPublica in 2017. He has also written for the Seattle Times and the Chicago Tribune and has received numerous accolades for his reporting on the criminal justice system. Mariba Knight is a reporter and host of the Peabody Award-winning podcast, The Promise, an immersive series from National Public Radio about inequality and the people trying to rise above it. She is currently a fellow in ProPublica's local reporting network. Our moderator today is National Public Radio news director Emily Siner. Emily is also the host of the Movers and Thinkers podcast and has traveled around Tennessee to tell national news stories for NPR and Marketplace. If you'd like to ask our panelists a question, just click the Q&A icon at the bottom of your screen to submit it to us. As an additional note, this session is being recorded and a link to the video will be emailed to everyone who registered. Thank you all so much again for being here today and I hope you enjoy the session. I'll let Emily take it from here. Thank you, Rocio. And good evening, welcome to this Q&A. As Rocio said, I'm Emily Siner and the news director of WPLN and was one of the lead editors in collaboration with ProPublica and I'm really thrilled to have Mariba Knight and Ken Armstrong here. We've been honored this past year to be part of the local reporting network which pairs local reporters and editors with ProPublica's editorial team with the goal of producing high impact journalism that draws on the talents of both newsrooms, which brings us to the story out of Tennessee. What Mariba and Ken found was complex and shocking. They started by trying to figure out what happened five years ago when police showed up at a school in Rutherford County, Tennessee and arrested several black children as young as eight years old. That incident sparked outrage locally at the time but until Mariba and Ken started requesting records and coming through depositions and court filings, it really hadn't been clear how such an egregious abuse of power was able to occur. Among the many findings in this piece which I highly recommend you read if you haven't yet, these children were arrested on charges that weren't actually real charges signed off on by judicial commissioners who are not required to have a law degree. The decision to arrest these children and bring them to the juvenile detention center was in line with the process set by the juvenile court judge and the judge's appointed jailer had set up an illegal filter system to determine which kids would be detained. And as Rocio said, the data showed that was a lot. Some of these issues have been stopped because of federal lawsuits filed recently but the judge and jailer in Rutherford County are still in charge. So with that, we're gonna start this Q&A to talk about some of the questions that y'all have already submitted. Mariba, I wanna start by pulling back the curtain for a moment on how an investigation like this even comes into being. You spent a year reporting this story before that other journals had written about the elementary school incident in Tennessee. So what was the impact of that earlier reporting? And then how did you decide to investigate Rutherford County further? Yeah, hi everybody. So it was a big event. It happened just a month after I moved to Nashville from Chicago. So it caught my attention greatly. And it really kind of pinged around every news organization covered it including national organizations like the New York Times and the Washington Post and the Daily Mail from across the pond. But it did immediately change a one policy which Murphysboro police stopped taking children who they arrested directly to the detention center. And a few other things were made aware to officials, but really it wasn't until these lawsuits started happening that there was a real shift just kind of started to occur. And I covered the federal injunction that happened in 2017. And that was what stopped the filter system and really widely kind of said you can't arrest children and bring them to the detention center. Although like I said, that had stopped in certain jurisdictions already. But when I talked to lawyers and when I read the complaint and when I started sifting through the court filings and read amended complaints because this was a lawsuit that started. It really started at a multiple lawsuits and then it kind of morphed and it ended up being really large. And it took time to kind of gain steam and traction. And what I had suspected when the incident happened was that it was kind of a canary in the coal mine. I thought something has got to be going on here. And so I just kind of kept tabs and when I dove into all of the materials of which there was many, many materials so with all the lawsuits that were filed I saw what I had suspected was that there was a really kind of unsettling mechanism behind these arrests. And I wanted to figure out exactly what that was, how it came to be, who was behind it. But lots of things kind of emerged that were new that hadn't come to be because of these lawsuits. So as the federal lawsuits kept piling up there was discovery happening there were things being filed, exhibits being filed, depositions happening. And so it was just as those things started to kind of fall into pacer you could see this really interesting picture emerging and I wanted to try to figure out what was going on. So luckily I got Ken to help me. I know there were lots of documents and recordings that you all had access to. What were some of those new pieces of evidence that you were able to find? I think first and foremost, beyond the court filings like I said, that were kind of trickling in which had depositions like I said, it had memos directly from the judge, from the jailer it had the standard operating procedures that had the filter system right there in black and white. Those were all not, they weren't in the public sphere. They weren't in the public realm at the point when these arrests happened. They only came later as the lawsuits started to pile up. But what can, and sifting through them wasn't toward in and of itself as Ken can tell you. I mean, just one lawsuit has hundreds of filings in the system, but also when the episode happened and that was being covered, there was another kind of burst of coverage when this internal investigation by the Murphysboro Police Department along with Nashville Police Department came out about almost a year later. And it was what happened. It was all these interviews and it was this compiling of many, many hours of interviews by police officials in Nashville and in Murphysboro to try to figure out what happened. And everyone relied on that report to write their story. And it was a thorough report, but Ken and I requested all of the audio which was 38 hours of audio of those investigative interviews and listened to all of that. And there was so much stuff in there that was not in the written report. So that was something that was really valuable to, for anybody who's read the piece, the whole opening, we were able to reconstruct that with that tape. It really allowed us to put you in the moment because it was this 360 degrees of interviewing and we were listening to the people as they were being asked it and telling it. And you just, you can't get that from a report. You know, you can't. Yeah, that was one of the really valuable parts of being part of, being in partnership with public and having two reporters working on this is a lot to go through. One of the key findings in this piece is the high rate of detention that occurred in Rutherford County, 48% in the most recent year that we have data compared to 5% statewide. Ken, what was the cause, what did you find was the cause of those high numbers? It mostly traces back to the filter system, which you've referred to and which Maraba referred to. And it was a system that Rutherford County had in place in its standard operating procedures since 2008. And it remained on the books for nine years. And what it was was a policy that was squarely at odds with Tennessee State Law. In Tennessee, if a child is referred to juvenile court, there's a presumption under state law that they should be locked up, that they should be detained prior to a delinquency hearing only under very narrow, precise circumstances because there's this understanding that incarceration is not good for kids. There are all kinds of ill effects that flow from jailing kids unless it's really necessary. So under Tennessee law, there are certain circumstances. For example, if a juvenile or if a child is an escapee from jail, then they should be detained prior to a delinquency hearing. If they have been accused of an offense that resulted in serious injury or death, then they could be or can be held prior to a delinquency hearing. These are very narrow categories that most kids don't fall into, which is why the statewide average is 5%. It's reflective of those narrow categories. Rutherford County went in a different direction and under its filter system, instead of having narrow, precise categories, they had the opposite. They had a broad vague category for when they would hold kids. And what they said is a child was deemed unruly. They could be held. They could be locked up prior to a delinquency hearing. What is unruly? Unruly under their standard operating procedures was defined as being a true threat. What is a true threat? It doesn't say. So any kid who is considered to be a true threat could be held and locked up prior to a delinquency hearing. And what Meribah and I found was in one deposition, a detention officer, somebody who worked in the jail, said that they were encouraged to interpret that broadly, that if they were going to err on either side, they were supposed to err on the side of holding a kid as opposed to releasing a kid. So that's why you have 48%. You have this wide discretion with an undefied term, true threat, as opposed to these narrow categories that were imposed by state law. The investigation also described the kind of discipline or punishment that the judge, Donna Scott Davenport, would issue for kids once they were in the system. What did that look like? It would vary. And it's something where we would see glimpses. Because of the way juvenile court has all these confidentiality procedures built in, and reasonably so, there are good reasons for a lot of those confidentiality rules. But we would see her or hear her talking on a radio show. She has a monthly radio show about circumstances under which she would have kids locked up who are as young as seven. She once said kids as young as eight or nine were fairly common. And what we were finding is that there were instances where she was approving solitary confinement for kids. Judge Davenport not only is in charge of juvenile court, she oversees the juvenile detention center. She appoints the head jailer and she's in charge of the jail. And there was one instance that we reported on in the story involving a 15-year-old who had intellectual disabilities. And he was being confined for 23 hours a day in his cell, in what was called indefinite isolation. And his was not a unique or isolated incident. There were at one time to more than 100 kids in a seven month period who were being held in solitary confinement there. And it was being done as punishment. It wasn't being done to protect the kids. It was being done to punish the kids. And this was one of those instances where Mayor Bozner was referring to multiple federal lawsuits. This was grounds for another federal lawsuit where a judge eventually ordered the county to stop that practice, to no longer confine kids, to isolate kids as a means of punishment. A lot of people, as the audience was submitting Q&As, a lot of people wrote some version of how, like how did this happen for so long? What governing body allowed this to happen? Is there any way to make sure it doesn't happen in the future? Mayor Bozner or Ken, what's your take on that? I mean, I can start, but it's complicated. I mean, as we outline in the story, there was a handful of oversight mechanisms that were woefully inadequate. A very obvious one was that the Department of Children's Services is the state agency that licenses every juvenile detention facility in the state. They would go and review and go inside and inspect the facility. They started doing it twice a year and later years, one visit was announced and one visit was unannounced. And we looked at all but one year when the filter system was in writing that one year was mysteriously lost. We could not get it, but all but one year and they never once flagged this filter system. It was right there in black and white. So they were going in, they were inspecting, they were looking at graffiti on the walls or they were looking if the shower was moldy or they were looking through reports and paperwork for youth and for employees and they were not looking at their standard operating procedures, the basic manual for how it operates. So that was one thing that we found. Ken, you wanna talk about some of the other stuff that we dug into as far as what was missing? Sure, and as Mary was saying, with those inspection reports, it really was striking to both of us when we solved them year after year. I mean, it really was an instance of missing the forest for the trees. They're talking about how clean the facility is and they're entirely missing the fact that their SOPs have an illegal policy right in there, in black and white, that is the explanation for that 48%. And with the 48%, one of the things that Mariba and I found is that the means that lawyers and other people had for seeing how much of an outlier Rutherford County was, those have largely disappeared from the way in which the state reports really important statistics. That 48 and 5% came from a state report in 2014 and the state no longer publishes that state report. It's no longer available on its website. So in terms of taking a county's practices and comparing it to statewide averages, that's no longer easily accessible. You have to do it by hand. And Mariba can attest to how difficult that is because she filed public records request after a public records request. And in some instances, what you would get, you have 95 counties and 98 juvenile courts in Tennessee. So you're basically building by hand that state report. So for each year, you're getting 98 reports, you're having to put them in a spreadsheet and you're building what the state used to do so that you could see these problem areas. And one of the things that really concerned us was that, okay, you can see how Rutherford County in that bar chart that we published, it's on the far right and its graphic just zooms way up. We're really wondering how many problems are in other areas that we're not seeing because of these data gaps. Those data gaps are a real concern. And it's something that the state itself knows is a problem. They simply haven't allotted the money and the resources to fix it yet. And just to add, you can't expect anyone but ridiculous investigative journalists to be doing this because we did request lots of records and we got more reports that the state had. So it's by statute, juvenile courts have to report this data, but the state isn't putting it together. So all of the individual counties like that data exists, you just have to go ask for it. They have to produce it and give it to you. And we got more data on Rutherford County. And what was so interesting to me was that up until that injunction, you saw that number keep climbing. It went above 50%. It went to 53%, I think at one year. The lawyers aren't using that number. The lawyers are looking at, this was a real big crux of their argument was like, how did this number come to be? Clearly there's something wrong. And they were using the most recent data they had available that was easy to get. They weren't gonna recreate this report even so. And it was interesting because the number that they were citing was a high number, but it wasn't even the highest of the, but at the same time, if we wanted to find the state average, we were gonna have to do that number crunching ourselves. Anyone was gonna have to do that themselves. So yeah, the numbers, the data is really important. And the other aspect that we did the tedious work of watching all the available public safety committee meetings, so the juvenile detention facility director has to go every month to go in front of the public safety committee, which is the seven county commissioners. And they have all of the meetings on YouTube going back to 2009, it's like almost 140 of them. Actually, I think, yeah, it was about that and I watched them all and took me awhile, but it was very helpful. And what we saw was that they were not asking any questions about policies and they were not asking questions about really much of anything except for are the bill, what are the outstanding bills? How much revenue have we pulled in? What's the head count? Like, oh, it's going down. Why is it going down? Oh, it's up. Why is it going up? And they were just very concerned with kind of the daily census. Like if they were going down, it was kind of like, is something wrong, which is kind of like, I remember one saying like, well, juveniles surely haven't become more law abiding. There was all this weird commentary and so it really gave you insight into kind of how the elected officials saw this place and where they lacked an oversight, where they weren't asking questions, even when they're slapped with all these federal lawsuits, almost not a word is uttered about them. So that was another aspect, was that the elected officials who are there to ask the questions, to kind of hold the purse strings for this place, were not asking the difficult questions. They just weren't. So now that this reporting is out there, some lawmakers have called for judicial investigations and to judge Davenport. And we should say that we've reached out to Davenport multiple times to ask to talk to her and she has declined. What might these calls lead to? Like what are the possible sanctions or disciplinary actions that can be taken against judges in Tennessee who even oversees judges or could make that decision? It depends on what the sanction is. Tennessee is really an unusual state. And I'll explain it, but the Board of Judicial Conduct is kind of the investigatory board in Tennessee for judges and they have the authority to issue private reprimands, public reprimands, censure or suspensions. They do not have the authority to remove a judge from the bench. Neither does the Tennessee Supreme Court. That's really unusual. In most states, it falls within the judicial branch to have the ultimate authority to remove someone from their judicial role. In Tennessee, if someone's gonna be removed as a judge, it has to happen in the legislature and it has to happen by two thirds of vote in both of the legislative chambers. That is a really high hurdle to clear. And in fact, it's such a high hurdle. We've only seen two instances in the last 50 years, in the last half century, where the legislature has voted to remove someone from the bench. And in both instances, it was a judge who had been convicted of serious felonies. The other thing about judicial investigations, and this is not unusual, is that it largely occurs in private. If there's an investigation being conducted, they won't say as much until it reaches a certain point. Until they decide that it's appropriate to have formal disciplinary charges or to have some kind of formal sanction. But in Tennessee, it really ultimately would fall to state lawmakers if they were interested in pursuing the ultimate sanction here. After that, I mean, in lieu of that, it would be voters because voters vote these judges into power. Absolutely, yeah. Judge Davenport is an elected judge. She's the only elected juvenile court judge that Kennedy has ever had. And the only time she's had an opponent was in her first election when she ran in 2000. They're voted or elected to eight-year terms there. And Judge Davenport did not have an opponent in either of her re-election campaigns, and she is up for re-election again next year. We don't know if she's going to run, but she has said previously that she was planning to. Maribeth, in your reporting on Judge Davenport, did you find that she was aware of any research about the limited capacity of juvenile brains to make decisions? I know that's something that I've heard Nashville's juvenile court judge talk about a lot. Or the long-term impact of detention, which Ken talked about, did that seem to factor into decisions from what you were able to find? I think she's spoken at times about the juvenile brain on the radio show a little bit. But in depositions with just going to the jailer because they asked her in a deposition point blank, how did you craft this? Did you consult any other facility? Any other facility anywhere about their policies? And she said, no. And I think that's really kind of in a nutshell, like the attitude that we found by and large in our reporting was that it's a pretty insular place. And there was not a lot of outreach to kind of think about how other systems worked. I think a really good example of that is one of the most helpful court filings that we came across was a needs assessment done. It was published in 2004 by a firm that the county hired to help them build a new juvenile jail and to build a correctional work center for adults. And they really sought this firm out. And they paid them, I think almost $200,000, right, Ken? And they came from New York and they said, what can we do? We're growing, we need to build something new. At this point, they were housing juveniles in a jail from 1887, an adult jail from 1887. It was decrepit. And they asked them to tell them what they should do. And the needs assessment is very revealing. I mean, they say, you're detaining way too many kids. You need to create a non-secure shelter for kids that are not a risk, but that needs support. You should build something around maybe, I think it was, well, less than what they ended up. I don't want to say the exact number because my brain is a little muddled, but it was far less than what they ended up with. And instead of taking that, and they really, they wrote this very long report. They cited kind of, this is the state of juvenile justice in the country, like these are, and they say, nothing about what Rutherford County is doing is in line with that. And you need to change the way you're doing things. And here's our recommendation. And the county, instead of taking that advice, fired the consultant and moved on with the plan of their own. And I think that's another example of kind of the attitudes. Like there wasn't a lot of kind of soaking up what was around them and being told to them. It was kind of like, we're going to do what we want to do. And what's striking about that is that consultant report came out in 2004. The year after that, the US Supreme Court handed down a decision where it said the death penalty was no longer appropriate or available for crimes committed when you're under the age of 18. What was going on nationally during all of this was that youth confinement numbers were declining. They're still high comparatively. Actually, the United States incarcerates a very high number of kids compared to other countries, but they were in decline. And there was all this research, showing that it's simply wrong to view children as being as morally culpable as adults for the same acts. Their brains are not as developed. They don't have the same level of impulse control. The US Supreme Court, after it said the death penalty was not appropriate for kids, seven years later, they said that neither was life without parole, that that was also an inappropriate punishment for kids. So while nationally you have this recognition going on that kids need to be treated differently than adults, Rutherford County was treating it there. County commissioners, as Maribos saying, are talking about this jail as though it's a financial enterprise. And the judge in the jailer that she appointed, they're detaining an extraordinarily high percentage of kids compared to the statewide average. So it's really striking when you see that juxtaposition. So let's talk about the people who've been impacted by these policies. You detail in the story how these children who were illegally arrested and detained and or held in solitary confinement have shown signs of lasting trauma. You interviewed several of these kids. Are any of those issues being addressed for them? You know, it's really, we don't know much. We know that in the case of the 11 kids who were arrested after that fight, the video of the fight was posted, and me and their settlements earmarked for counseling. And that was great, you know, that they had that. But the fact is, is that the class action lawsuit has pointed to, you know, 1500 kids that were illegally jailed and 500 kids that were illegally arrested. And this is just over a fraction of a period of time that doesn't necessarily encompass all of the years that these policies were around. We have no idea really whether there's been any help for these kids at all. And I think, you know, yeah, we don't, we have no idea. I was really struck. Maraba interviewed a number of kids, some now adults who had been detained in Rutherford County and the counts they shared with Maraba were really wrenching to me. Dylan Geerts, for example. And I should say how grateful we are that they shared their stories with us. I mean, I know that that's hard to do. But, you know, Dylan Geerts, you know, told Maraba about how he had been on a lithium, you know, a form of medication when he was detained. And he wasn't given that lithium, you know, while he was in the jail for three days and how profoundly it affected him afterwards. And, you know, he tried three times, you know, and I believe 16 months after he was out to kill himself. And he just talked about the profound trauma that he experienced from those three days and the lasting impact that it had on him. And I remember reading the transcript of Maraba's interview with him and doing some of that multiplication when Maraba was talking about 1,500 children who had been wrongfully detained, 500 kids who had been wrongfully arrested and just wondering how many children there are who have accounts like he did or who had accounts like other children who have gone through that system. Yeah, and even, oh, sorry. I just want to say, like Darius was the young man we talked to who spent so much time in solitary. And it was, you know, he was really, him and his family were so brave to kind of go out there and be part of that lawsuit because they were just seeking to stop it. They weren't going to get any money from this lawsuit. But, you know, talking to him and his mom, he, you know, and in his deposition, he says, like I was in solitary more often than I wasn't. And he was in there for months, okay? So he says, I talk to myself because I did for so long and he paces and he, you know, he can't concentrate and he needs stimulation from all things all the time. And it was really hard even sitting and talking with me. I mean, we talked for a few hours and it was really a struggle. And his mom had to kind of, you know, just check in with him and ask him if he needed a break and you could see it. You could see it physically in him and it's heartbreaking. It's just heartbreaking. I also want to note that there's a class action lawsuit that's currently open until the end of this week and it's seeking out kids who are affected illegally detained. So that's something to look into if you were part of that. Yeah, and yeah, you know, you can Google it, Bristol Clark is a law firm. But, you know, and I think that's really it. It's like, I think from talking to the lawyers, they think, well, is there something we can get for the kids on the back end of this? And it's, but otherwise, you know, everybody's kind of moved on. Yeah, we've gotten a lot of questions with some variation of this wanting to know how race plays into the juvenile justice system in Rutherford County. All of the kids in the kind of primary incident that you documented were black. Do we know what percentage of children overall arrested in Rutherford County are black? We have glimpse of that, but with the data gaps that we have talked about, it's very hard to know because again, juvenile court is largely private. But yes, like I said, we know some of that data. So the year the Hobbit arrest took place, 35% of the children arrested were black. This is in Rutherford County. The most recent data we have available from 2019, that number went up to 37% of the kids arrested were black. And that's important because it's not representative of the county. The county is now 70% white, 15% black. So when you hear 37% of the kids are black and only 15% of the kids in the county are black, that's an over-representation. And in advance of this conversation, I went and looked a little more. And it's interesting because those numbers have shifted a fair amount over the years. And the county's demographics have shifted, but early like in 2000, so this is the first year that the juvenile court was established in earnest. And there was a dedicated juvenile court, 84% of the kids arrested were white and 14% were black and just under 2% were Latino. So that was actually closer to the overall demographics at the time. At the time, the county was 86% white and 9.5% black and 3% Latino. So it's interesting to me that as the county, as the years have gone on, the number of white children has dropped and the number of black children has increased percentage-wise away from the overall kind of representation in terms of who lives in the county. So that's what we do know, but when it comes to who is detained and locked up, they don't break out those numbers. So our understanding of who is getting sucked in to the juvenile justice system really stops there. We know who's getting sucked in, then from there we don't know what's happening to them. And Maribeth, was that a law firm, Brazil Clark? We've got a question. Just to repeat the name of it, Brazil Clark. Yes, Brazil Clark. So as Ken mentioned, this is just one juvenile court out of 98 in the state, one state out of 50. A lot of readers asked how they can find out more about what's happening in their own local juvenile justice systems. What would you say is the first step to even see what kind of information is available? You wanna take that, Ken, or should I start? You wanna start? Sure, sure, yeah, yeah. It's a hard question. It's a local girl here. It's a hard question, which is why I'm hunting, so. Yeah, no, no, no. Yes, so it is really hard because even I, the native, not a native, but like I live here and I had such a steep learning curve to figure out what was happening in juvenile court. For one, all the terminology is different. Like you're not convicted. It's called a determination. Like you don't get a warrant. It's like petition, but really doesn't, it's not really a warrant. Like all the terms are different. So it's like, it is court, but it's like got all new terminology. So I had to learn that. If you wanna get into digging into your own jurisdiction, the first thing I would do would be to see if there is any data, to see if the administrative office of the courts produces any kind of data around the juvenile court system in your state, in your county, and you can start there. I also called lots and lots of juvenile defense attorneys, many, many, many, and asked them, because that's your only window into the courtroom really, is to just try to talk to as many people who are representing the children and ask them about what they're seeing, about what cases they're getting. So that's another thing. That's more labor intensive than going to the AOC or going to some body that may hold all these numbers and saying, what do you have? But then also look in your state statutes. I mean, Ken and I, that was really important was for our own understanding to really get a sense of like, what is, now I can rattle them off like 37-1-114, you know, to understand all the statutes that surround juveniles, juvenile detention, juvenile arrest, diversion, whatever there is, really try to internalize those so that when you're reading things and when you're hearing things, you can start to be like, wait, that does not compute. That doesn't comport with what my understanding of the law is. So those are a few quick ideas for folks. And the states differ in terms of what kind of access they provide to the public. It would probably be worth finding out if in your state, you're allowed to actually sit in the courtroom for different kinds of proceedings, because in some states you are. And if you are, I think spending a day or two or three in the courtroom and watching would be invaluable. Beyond that, I think the inspection reports are really helpful. You could have a state agency, such as in Tennessee, it was the Department Children's Services, that inspects part of the juvenile justice system, detention centers. You could have federal inspection reports. They're called PREA reports. Those are worth looking at. And it's always helpful to see if there have been any lawsuits filed. That Maribo was talking earlier about a lot of the work, a lot of the information we were using to write the story. And it really was a collection. Lawyers get access that we don't when they file lawsuits because they have discovery powers, right? So they're able to get access to documents that we can't get through a public records request. But a lot of times their focus is narrow and they're not pulling all the records that we want. So we'll file public records requests for things that they wouldn't get. So I think if you can cast your net as broadly as possible, looking for lawsuits, filing public records requests, I apologize, it's leaf blower day here in Seattle. So I apologize for the noise over there. But yeah, I think it's one of those things where you just try to Hoover up everything that you can. And as Maribo was saying, I think a lot of times if you talk to people who work with inside the system, they also have a good sense of what documentation might be available and they can help point you in a good direction. And they know those terms, like what all the things are that you need to ask for. And then what Ken said about sitting in, that is so important. And I had really grand plans to be sitting in on lots of courts and of course, COVID shut everything down. But it's one note about that is in Tennessee, we have rule 114, which allows us to go and observe delinquency hearings and delinquency court proceedings. Now, it's a rather new rule. And so what I was told was a lot of judges are gonna deny you. They're gonna say no way. And you gotta just present this rule and say, no, this is allowed. It's only a few years old, but it's allowed. So be sure to know if there is access, have it with you, like have the actual statute or whatever it is that you need. Because a lot of judges will just say no, because that's the way it's been and that's the way they think should be. Or clerks will say no. And I had to really go to battle with clerks and with judges say, no, no, I actually, I am allowed to have this information. Because a lot of clerks will say everything is sealed and you can't have anything. That's not the case. There are some things you can have. Yeah, and I'm sorry Emily. No, no, no, go for it. Last tip, Ken. It would actually be a request for people to share tips with us. I'm hoping that there might be some people on this call who have expertise in this area who work in juvenile justice. And if they know of anything that we should be paying more attention to or be looking at, if they can let us know that would be incredibly helpful. Or if people have had personal experience with the juvenile court either in Rutherford County or elsewhere in Tennessee or elsewhere nationally, we would really appreciate hearing about those experiences under whatever conditions people would be comfortable with. Since we published the story, we have received a lot of emails and phone calls and it really does help direct our reporting from here on out. Just knowing what people are dealing with and what they think we should be focusing on. The week is getting louder. I'm sorry. That's our signal to wrap. Thank you so much, Marybeth and Ken. And before I go back to Rocio, I also just want to thank ProPublica for your support of local reporting and my co-editor on the story, Sarah Blustain. And thank you all for your questions. Some of them can be answered in the story and some of them we hope to explore in future reporting. That is our time for today. Thank you again to Ken Armstrong and Marybeth Knight for this excellent conversation. And of course our moderator, Emily Siner, who did an excellent job today fielding all of those questions and organizing this little conversation. I'd like to give you, I'd like to give a special thank you to McKinsey and Company for their support as well. And of course, thank you to our audience for joining us and fair thoughtful questions. Again, this event has been recorded so you'll receive an email this week with the full video of today's event. To everyone who registered, we will also post this recording to our YouTube channel. And from all of us at ProPublica, thank you for joining us. Have a great rest of your evening and we'll see you next time.